english language essay

University Students Can Improve Their Vocabularies English Language Essay

Published: 23, March 2015

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English teachers face myriad demands every day that include not only helping students read literature in interesting and engaging ways but also attending to the needs of students challenged by the demands of more complex and sophisticated texts. Vocabulary learning is at the heart of this struggle for many students, especially for English language learners and students who have difficulty with literacy skill development. Obviously, a lack of vocabulary knowledge limits students' understanding of a passage and also hinders their ability to engage in the deeper reading. Teachers use different methods for different students in different age and places, such as: multimedia and new technology, readings, flash cards, cognitive approach and so forth.

Some New Ways through Which University Students Can Improve Their Vocabularies of a Foreign Language

Knowing a foreign language has become crucial to reach information. Learning vocabulary is the fundamental step to learn a foreign language. New devices are invented everyday to fulfill the needs of citizens of the twenty-first century. Increased use of mobile phones has made them popular for not only communication, but also entertainment and learning purposes. Mobile phones have provided remarkable advantages in learning process. They provide opportunity for learning to occur outside the classroom walls in anytime and anyplace. Results of research designed with sixty students of public university, located in the black sea region Turkey, indicated that using mobile phones as a vocabulary learning tool is more effective than one of the traditional vocabulary learning tools.

Another way is through multimedia. Employing multimedia has recently intruded the process in easing or complicating manners. There was a study focused on the effectiveness of English subtitles on the EFL learner's vocabulary learning. The participants were 92 Iranian degree university students studying Translation at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad, Iran. They were given two different instructions, one practicing instructional video episodes with subtitles and the other without subtitles. Their vocabulary learning was tested by a Content Specific Test (CST). The mean scores of the two groups were compared through a t-test. The findings illustrated that participants viewing the videos with subtitles could obtain a significantly higher mean score of the CST vocabulary tests than that of the ones who viewed the videos without subtitles.

Another study examined the impact of animation interactivity on novices' learning of introductory statistics. The interactive animation program used in this study was created with Adobe Flash following Mayer's multimedia design principles. The subject matter of the animation program was on "Principles of Hypothesis Testing" ,a difficult topic for novice learners. The study was over and result showed progress for the group used this animated interactivity.

Vocabulary learning is at the heart of this struggle for many students, especially for English language learners and students who have difficulty with literacy skill development. Obviously, a lack of vocabulary knowledge limits students' understanding of a passage and also hinders their ability to engage in the deeper reading teachers aim for in their teaching. In the recent study of MIT students, 192 students randomly were chosen and were tested for a month. After a month results showed significant progress among those along with the reading comprehension, who read the texts with cognitive strategies.

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition ( AoA ) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an effort to find a laboratory analog of AoA effects which would allow such issues to be addressed more easily, we conducted three experiments in which participants learned foreign words, with some ("early") words trained from the outset while other ("late") words were introduced some time later then interleaved with the early words. Order of acquisition effects were observed in picture naming, lexical decision and semantic categorization, persisting for several weeks after the end of training. The results demonstrate an important role for order of acquisition in the formation of lexical representations that is independent of other factors such as cumulative frequency, frequency trajectory and imageability. The discovery of order of acquisition effects in word learning also has implications for classroom teaching of second language vocabulary.

A substantial amount of literature regarding first language (L1) acquisition has shown that reading for meaning significantly contributes to vocabulary expansion and strongly relates to overall academic success. The study investigates ESL students' vocabulary learning outcomes through reading facilitated by a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program that supports their word recognition ability. It focuses on the differences in their understanding of target words in both their first and second languages (L2) that have rarely been studied. The results from both monolingual and bilingual receptive vocabulary tests show that the students learned more words with access to computer-mediated dictionaries than without; however, the variations in their vocabulary learning in the CALL environment were found to be related to their English skills and conceptual knowledge of target words in their L1. Bilingual vocabulary tests demonstrate great potential, as a more sensitive assessment measure, in accurately evaluating ESL students' vocabulary learning progress, given their a typical language development trajectory.

The aim of specific study was to investigate vocabulary knowledge and growth across two different language-learning programmes in Hong Kong. The two programmes compared were English immersion programmes (IM) and regular English second-language programmes (RL2). While previous research has identified an overall advantage to IM with respect to language development, comparatively little research on vocabulary development in IM has examined the potential interaction between different types of words (in terms of frequency levels) and different types of vocabulary (passive versus active). Furthermore, very little work has compared these two specific educational contexts in Hong Kong with respect to vocabulary growth. Therefore, three different aspects of vocabulary were measured: passive, controlled active and free active word knowledge at different word-frequency levels in grade 7 and grade 9 students in both IM and RL2. The Vocabulary Levels Tests measured students' knowledge of passive and controlled active vocabulary, whereas students' writing was analysed with the Lexical Frequency Profiles to estimate their free active vocabulary knowledge. Overall, IM students outperform their counterparts in RL2 concerning their knowledge of different types of vocabulary at various frequency levels. IM students also experience a more rapid growth in their vocabulary knowledge, especially for the most frequent 2000 words and academic vocabulary. Such findings support the claim that IM can provide a more favorable context for L2 vocabulary learning than regular L2. The results of the present study are discussed in terms of wider implications for vocabulary learning and the effectiveness of the IM programmes implemented in Hong Kong.

Conclusion

Time goes on and everything changes, and for humans, the need for new information and communication grows. The main device for communication is speech through words known as vocabulary. Peoples are different; therefore, their way of learning is different. All around the world, there are new different methods for different new students in different age and places, such as: multimedia and new technology, readings, flash cards, cognitive approach and so forth and still gorows.

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